Incidental burning on bones by Neanderthals: the role of fire in the Qa level of Abric Romaní rock‑shelter (Spain)

The Abric Romaní rock-shelter (Capellades, Barcelona) is a key site for studying the use of fire among Neanderthal communities. The evidence of its use, including the identification of heated faunal remains, has led to infer the practice of some domestic activities in the site, such as cooking, use of bones as fuel, or habitat surface cleaning throughout the entire sequence. In the Qa level, dated ca. 58 ky BP, heated bones are characterized by the predominance of brown homogeneous surfaces, a different pattern from those described for the abovementioned activities. Here, an experiment is presented to clarify the domestic activities at the Qa level. We built hearth replicas and heated defleshed shaft fragments in fresh and dry. The recovered fragments were described according to their coloration and spatial relationship in the hearth. Following these parameters, a new classification method of heated bones from archeological sites is proposed: color and its distribution on the bone surface. We detected differences in color depending on whether they were buried or not and whether they were from the center or the peripheral areas. The brown bones with the color homogeneously distributed on their surface were exclusively found on buried heated bones. Compared with the remains from the Qa level, the results suggest that the post-depositional burning of the faunal remains was habitual, which could be related to the overlapping occupations at this level.Funding for fieldwork is provided by the Ajuntament de Capellades and Romanyà-Valls. We acknowledge the Catalonian Government for concession of the Quadrennial Project CLT009/18/00054. To the research group SGR2017-1040 and the research group SGR -2017-836. To the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación of Spanish Government project MCI EIN2020-112254. E. Téllez is beneficiary of a PEJ grant (PEJ2018-005210-A) funded by the Spanish National System of Garantía Juvenil and the European Social Fund. A. Pineda is supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through the “Subprograma Juan de la Cierva-Formación” programme (FJC2019-040804-I). P.S., J.V. and M.G.CH. research is funded by CERCA Programme/Generalitat de Catalunya. This research was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through the “María de Maeztu” excellence accreditation (CEX2019-000945-M).Peer reviewe